Attitude control system for nanosatellites with reaction wheel and magnetorquer actuators

This work has been done by Sevil M. Sadigh under supervision of Professor Leonardo Reyneri at the Polytechnic University of Turin1, Italy. Sevil M. Sadigh is PhD student from Iran and she is doing her PhD thesis, at the moment. A part of her thesis is about satellite attitude control. She has worked on this part of her PhD thesis at the Department of Electronics and Telecommunications, as a visiting research scholar for a period of six months, from May 5th to Nov 5th 2017.
The works done in this period is described in this text as follows. In section 1, coordinate frames such as inertia, body, and orbit are described to determine the satellite attitude. Some types of orbital classifications like as centric classifications, altitude classifications for geocentric orbits, eccentricity classifications, and inclination classifications are described in section 2. Also, some necessary information like as orbital elements, orbital period and earth magnetic field are explained. In section 3, satellite attitude and the types of the rotation are described. Also, how to convert them to each other are explained. Then satellite kinematic and dynamic equations are described in section 4. Attitude actuators, their characteristics, advantages and disadvantages and their operations are explained in section 5. Attitude control is described in section 6. Attitude control approach used in this work is SMC2. SMC method is explained its advantages and disadvantages is described then the controller is designed for satellite attitude control with magnetorquer and reaction wheel actuators, in this section. In section 7, the proposed attitude control is simulated for the nanosatellites with several combinations of the actuators. At first, a sample attribute motion for tracking has been described. Then, attitude dynamic and kinematic of the satellite has been explained. The numerical model for the attitude control has been described in the next section. Finally, the performed simulations are explained. In the final section, the conclusion and future works are described.